


a mind full of questions, a current to purify

by folkloricfeel



Series: Float like a pretty box of your evil [2]
Category: Descendants (2015), The Isle of Lost - Melissa de la Cruz
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-13 00:53:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4501524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/folkloricfeel/pseuds/folkloricfeel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos is nine when he discovers science.</p>
<p>(The flipside to jannika's Honesty will wreck this point that we made. Jay/Carlos, a little bit of implied Ben/Carlos, background mentions of canon Ben/Mal, Evie/Chad, and Evie/Doug.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	a mind full of questions, a current to purify

**Author's Note:**

> There is some non-explicit teenage sexual activity in the latter part of the fic, along with canon-compliant child abuse and violence throughout, but nothing out of place with the darker elements of worldbuilding in the book and movie. There are also minor implications of homophobia at a few points.

_Carlos De Vil’s brain, by way of comparison, was almost as big as Cruella De Vil’s fur-coat closet. That’s what Carlos tried to tell himself, anyway._

Carlos is nine when he discovers science.

He won't quite have the words to call it that yet - kids on the island don't start their Weird Science courses until the sixth grade, of course, but even before he learns the proper terminology, it will take a while for him to understand everything the diagrams in the pamphlet tucked into his back pocket can represent, a while still for him to start seeing the building blocks and possibilities hiding inside simple instructions about remote controls and timer buttons. He won't be thinking about anything but immediate practical application when, while he's staking his claim to a pile over in the least chaotic part of the dumpster barge, he finds the front page of it stuck to a half-empty bottle of window cleaner spray.

A manual for a coffeemaker, Carlos realizes, trying to thumb through the pages carefully (his mother would probably kill him if he came home with chewing gum on his leather gloves, he thinks). 

He doesn't know the first thing about coffeemakers, but he thinks maybe with a manual, he could figure out how to fix the broken one on their kitchen counter, the one that's been collecting cobwebs for as long as he can remember. He thinks about those commercials on the Auradon News Network, the obnoxious ones with the yawning princess whose pajamas turn into a glamorous ballgown when her faithful birds serve her her morning cup of Royal Grounds, and he thinks that maybe, if he has time in between his other chores, he could fiddle around and make it work again with this. He certainly doesn't think a nice cup of bitter brew in the mornings will turn his mother into some kind of Cinderella (nor would he want it to, he shudders), but the thought that it might make her a _little_ less irritable than when she insists it's his fault yet again for ruining her regular order from the Slop Shop (not enough curdled cream one day, too much the next, too cold from him taking too long to get home with it the day after) is enough for him to decide to pocket it along with the window cleaner.

"Ha, would you look at that!" a voice says from above him, and he turns to see LeRoy, LeFou's son from a few grades above him, pulling a bottle out of Carlos' knapsack bag, that, oh, no, _no no no_. "Just what I was looking for today."

"Put that back!" Carlos says, grabbing for the bottle, but LeRoy laughs and holds it above his head, higher than Carlos' small arms can stretch. "Hey! My mom needs that!"

"Not as much as Gaston does," LeRoy smirks, and ducks away as Carlos lunges at him again, making Carlos trip over his bag. LeRoy high-fives another minion boy and, in the commotion of Carlos trying to grab for his spilled bottles and baubles before anyone can swipe anything else, runs away with the damaged bottle of leather shoe polish he was specifically told not to come home without.

His mother really is going to kill him this time, he thinks.

She doesn't kill him, but she does send him to his closet without dinner as soon as he gets home that afternoon, which, with the way his stomach is rumbling, might as well be just as bad a fate. So that night, Carlos calms himself down by pulling the manual out of his pocket again, squinting through the light underneath the dressing room door to read the gum-crusted pages over and over again until they finally start to drown out the shame of replaying watching LeRoy running away down the barge ramp.

Maybe he will surprise his mother this weekend when she goes away to the Spa, he thinks as he's huddled back in his corner on the lumpy mattress later, still holding onto the sticky pages beside him. It's the first, but certainly not the last, time that thinking about science lets him finally drift off to sleep a little.

*

He knows that it's - unusual - for the children of proper villains to be sent out to the dumpster barge when it comes in every other week, but he doesn't think that much of it, not yet, not really. It's not like he's expected to rummage through other people's dumpsters for secondhand trash, or raid goblin boats, or forage for their food scraps when those get delivered on their own barge - that sort of thing is what they keep Harry and Jace around for - it's just that it's very important for him, for his chores, to be there bright and early on Saturday mornings to have first dibs at the busted-up containers and discarded goods for cleaning supplies. It’s just that, he thinks, looking around at the other children of advisers and lesser minions waiting for the barge with him, Flotsam’s twin eel sons splashing around in the water by the dock - his family situation is, well. Different than theirs is.

He doesn’t think about it that often, mostly because he doesn’t really have _time_ to think about it, between chores and his studies during the day and the stash of appliance manuals collected under his mattress. They get discarded pretty often on the barges, he’s realized, now that he’s been paying attention to more than how much laundry detergent and toilet bowl cleaner he can grab - he assumes the people of Auradon must have servants who fix these sorts of things for them, and quickly grimaces at the thought, because minions are bad enough to deal with, right? And so, over the past year he’s added all _sorts_ of things to his collection, from vacuum cleaner instructions that have come in handy on random Saturday afternoons tidying his mother’s rugs to hourglasses and time-turners that are useless without their magical component to expensive-looking Auradonian gadgets he’s never seen before (and can’t fathom that anyone would want, he reminds himself). There are other things he ends up with, too, because when you’re fighting dozens of other kids for whatever you can grab, you can hardly be picky with anything that looks like a pamphlet or a few pages stapled together; he throws out the ones like the Auradon newspapers, because watching the news is bad enough as it is, but every once in a while he comes across something else he wants to keep for his stash, like a booklet of videogame cheat codes (which he saves for the cheating factor, obviously, because even if they had videogames on the island, he tells himself he’d never want to _play them with other kids_ ) and, once, a mail-order catalog he’d considered saving to give to his mother as a birthday present so that she could make fun of how ugly and cheaply-made the fur coats were in comparison to her own. Mostly, though, he picks through garbage piles and peels sticky pages off the sides of the barge walls to add to his collection of troubleshooting tips for what to do when your microwave won’t pop exactly the right number of popcorn kernels or when your carriage wheels start to get squeaky, his collection that, for reasons he can’t fully put together yet, has become his most prized possession.

It’s not his priority right now, though, because Hell Hall is running low on floor wax and his mother is almost out of her bunion cream, and he knows it won’t be a pretty sight for anyone to watch her wince and tiptoe around through unpolished hallways - not that he’d be able to see it from behind the locked closet door, mind you. He looks around the dock again, taking stock of who he'll be fighting with for supplies today; LeRoy and his cronies aren't here, thankfully, but some of the pirate boys are, which makes him swallow down a gulp thinking of their fondness for shoving the younger kids overboard, for the nostalgia of their parents' glory days as much as their competitiveness in scoring the best goods. He scans the rest of the usual suspects and sees a boy he doesn't recognize immediately, his long hair pulled back into a ponytail and his thumbs hooked into his pockets, but before he has too much time to wonder who he is, he hears a shout from a royal vizier's son start to echo through the group and, sure enough, turns to see the dumpster barge come into view heading toward the docks.

His strategy is always the same: give the older kids a minute to get caught up harassing the barge driver and shoving at each other, and duck aboard to find a small, unassuming corner somewhere to fill up his bag and pockets. He gets caught back in the shuffle today, though, and by the time he makes it up the ramp and aboard, there are already pirate boys crowding up all of his usual corners. Not about to fight them for their loot, he sees an open spot on the other side of the barge over by a swarm of squawking parrots and weighs that being pecked at by pet accomplices is surely better than explaining to his mother why his furs are soaking wet and covered in dock sludge, so he takes a deep breath and tries to calculate the best way to avoid anyone more than a foot taller than himself -

And feels a much larger someone shove hard into his side, knocking the wind right out of him and laughing as he stumbles to the ground.

It's the stumble that loses him his chance to rummage through the garbage bag of expired Her Highness' Cosmetics stock before the Silly Girls' daughters tear it apart, but that puts him face-to-face with what will soon become his most prized possession yet: a Princely Scouts' Guide to Wilderness and Epic Quest Survival handbook laying on the barge floor beside him.

"Having fun down there?"

Carlos looks up and sees the boy from earlier on the docks, the one with the ponytail, grinning down at him. He straightens himself up and brushes some dirt off his furs, mortified and a little terrified that the boy will kick him or make some awful comment about his obvious lack of physical prowess in comparison to the other kids (his mother has made it clear many times, after all, often by her own cutting words, that being called the runt of the litter is the worst insult there is). "Just looking for something, it's all good, no worries," he says with a nervous laugh, and grabs for the Princely Scouts' Guide, waving it up at the boy before slipping it into his pocket. "See? Found it."

The boy smirks at him and offers him a hand. "Good, because you're sitting on something I want." He nods to the teakettle beside Carlos, half-buried under an old pair of jeans, and Carlos picks it up before tentatively reaching up to take the boy's hand. Carlos winces, waiting to be shoved back down again once the boy gets his loot, but the boy just winks at him and says, "good luck," before bounding off toward where some of the pirate boys are fighting over some valuable-looking pieces of jewelry.

Carlos learns two things in the following days. 

One: the boy's name is Jay, and he is Jafar's son who runs the secondhand shop on the other side of the island with him, and from paying attention to the rumors at school, he usually has other ways of getting his shop goods than dumpster barges. 

But far more importantly, two: he learns just how valuable the Princely Scouts' Guide might be.

The Guide is part historical literature, he learns later that evening, reading after he's locked in for the night, mostly self-important babble he halfheartedly skims about the value of foraging and survival skills when princes of the past have faced the dangers of an epic quest to save a princess from a thorny tower or hidden island. It’s also part instructional manual, for earning Scouts' badges related to said foraging and survival. Those parts he reads voraciously, because for all of his collected troubleshooting tips and assembly instructions, he's never read anything that tells him how he can _make_ things, all on his own, rather than fix or put back together someone _else's_ things. The Guide is full of instructions for projects, though, most with no practical use for him whatsoever, like how to make healing poultices from the right kind of berries or how to pitch a tent or how to pick the best kind of timber to make a ramming barrier to storm down a castle door. He can't imagine anyone ever wanting to rescue a princess, for any reason - or that any of these scout badges could be useful as much else beyond activities for those awful camping trips he sees in the Princely Scouts commercials, seeing as how all the evil fairies and wicked stepmothers who might kidnap princesses are locked away under the island dome now - but there are a few that he thinks he can, in fact, absolutely work with.

Like the list on page seventeen of what supplies to pack before embarking on a princess-rescuing quest in order to make a simple do-it-yourself heater, just in case you're caught in an enchanted forest where starting a fire might accidentally signal evil spirits.

A heater, he thinks, pulling the old rags around him he uses for blankets as tightly as he can.

He falls asleep every night for the next two weeks until the next barge comes in thinking about batteries and empty soda cans and wires and, every now and again, about Jafar's son Jay from the other side of the island.

(Only because of how much better his loot ended up being than Jay's teakettle could possibly have sold for, of course.)

*

His tiny tin-can heater, when it's finished three weeks later, works for exactly sixteen minutes, is only strong enough to keep his fingertips warm, and produces a terrible burning smell that lingers in his mother's wigs and sends her into a rage, which is how his first invention ends up hurled at the trash bin the following morning.

Carlos doesn't dream of batteries and wires and besting Jafar's son that night. Instead, he dreams of wild packs of vicious dogs chasing him down a ravine, and wakes up lying on the floor, rolled off his mattress and into the corner of his closet, huddled and shivering.

*

Carlos is twelve when he starts to realize just _how_ different his family situation is from the other kids on the island.

He’s started to develop a reputation now that he’s in middle school, learning actual interesting things like Weird Science instead of elementary-level Menacing; his classmates these days refer to him by terms like the Science Geek, the Smart One, and in the worst instances, the Nerd. He’s hoping that by the time he hits high school he’ll have been able to cultivate his overachiever tendencies into something less Awkward Bookworm and more Evil Genius Hell-Bent On World Domination, but for now, his intelligence mostly gets him shoved into lockers between class periods and picked first to do all the work for group projects, which is how he ends up paired up for his History of Evildoing report with Anthony Tremaine, one of the most popular and fearful eighth-graders in the entire school.

He returns home from the Saturday barge with his bag full of dirty dishrags and his mother’s favorite smelly perfume and his pockets full of invention supplies, only to find Anthony already in his kitchen, poking around in the refrigerator.

“You’re early,” Carlos says, slinging his bag over the back of one of the dining room chairs and mentally adding, _and at my house_. The plan had been to study at the Slop Shop, because even the loud grumbling of goblins would make for a better studying environment than what might happen if his mother decided when she woke up that he ought to be ironing her clothes instead of doing schoolwork. “I thought we weren’t meeting until two.”

“One of your minions let me in,” Anthony says, popping a shriveled grape into his mouth out of the mostly-empty bowl on the refrigerator shelf, “I’ve got a hot date with Harriet Hook tonight, so I wanted to get an early start on hearing what you’re planning on writing for me.” Carlos tells himself that the way he feels off-balance at Anthony’s leering expression at that is, surely, because proper dating is generally frowned upon on the island, but he reminds himself that Anthony is one of the few islanders who comes from a regal background, so he can’t be too disgusted at the thought. Old habits of former glory, he thinks.

“Well, I was thinking we could research and find some villain who, like, wanted to build a huge bomb and take over the world or something,” Carlos says, because he’s certain his classmates will all pick the obvious choices for a biography report - their parents, or their parents’ sworn arch-nemeses on the island - and an obscure choice that required more study than listening to their parents ramble about their evil heyday would be sure to earn them a better grade.

“Mmhmm,” Anthony nods idly around a mouthful of grape, “hey, what’s this?” He pulls Carlos’ mother’s daily chore list note off the fridge and frowns. “Make sure all my boots are polished twice and Baby gets a bath before you start any schoolwork, if you want your dinner tonight, that is,” he reads, and Carlos’ face flushes. “Wow, your mom sure knows how to threaten the minions, huh?”

Carlos grabs the note out of Anthony’s hand, avoiding eye contact with him as he does and hoping that Anthony doesn’t look too long at all the other similar notes littered all over the fridge. “That’s mine, actually,” he mumbles, “but anyway, I was reading up about this guy who wanted to make a weather machine that would’ve controlled the ocean currents - ”

“Wait,” Anthony says, frowning. “Your mom makes _you_ do those sorts of things?”

“I mean,” Carlos lies, “just sometimes. Only if the minions mess up too much.” Anthony is looking at him with an expression he can’t quite place - he thinks it would be pity, or something like that, if villains could feel that sort of thing, but since they can’t, he assumes he must be misreading Anthony’s disgust and embarrassment over having to do a project with someone who isn’t regal enough to not have to do his own chores. “You know how picky she is about her stuff,” he says, and adds a nervous laugh for good measure.

“Carlos,” Anthony says, and it makes something tight flutter up in Carlos’ chest - pride, probably, at hearing one of the most feared and respected boys in school say his actual name instead of _hey, Nerd_. “You know that that isn’t - ” he starts, then pauses and shakes his head. “Your parents are supposed to teach you how to be a proper villain like them when you grow up. This sort of thing is what we have minions for,” he says, pointing to the note in Carlos’ hand.

“I know,” Carlos lies again, “and she does, of course she does. It’s just that I’m the only one she trusts to get things clean right, that’s all.”

Later that night, lying in bed in his closet replaying that look on Anthony’s face when he’d said his name earlier, Carlos thinks he should probably be more careful about letting classmates over to his house, at least the formerly-regal ones.

It’s just that his family situation is, well.

Different than theirs.

*

If he’s being honest with himself, he cannot ever remember caring much about princesses one way or the other, not even when he was little and the rules of evil and good mattered less than the distraction of soft voices and shining crowns on the television set.

It’s always made him feel a little out of the loop, a little less than properly villainous, because whether anyone would admit it or not, the island is just as obsessed with princesses as Auradon is. Most of their parents have reason to be, of course; without princesses ruining their lives long ago, none of them would be stuck on this island, but it’s not just their parents’ tales that are focused on the _fairest of them all_. Princess hate has always been trendy: for an apple core, the Bargain Castle will sell you cups with a frizzy-haired Aurora or snaggle-toothed Jasmine crudely painted on the side, the slogan “Down With Princesses” scrawled to match on the saucers. His classmates have been playing Pin The Zit On The Princess at birthdays and using Rapunzel’s name as a curse word for as long as he can remember, but as they’ve all gotten older and started high school, the insults have started to take on a new sort of spin.

Like when he’s changing for gym class the first week of freshman year and overhears one of Gaston’s twins whispering with LeRoy, talking about the weekend’s broadcast of the annual Royale Fashion Gala.

“Ew, man, you’ve got to be kidding me,” the twin says, shoving LeRoy against the gym locker and making a grossed-out face. “ _Princess Anna_ , for real?”

“Oh, come on, you think Elsa’s any better in the sack?” LeRoy smirks. “I wouldn’t mind _storming her castle_ , if you know what I mean.” The twin mimics a gagging motion. “Just as long as she kept her mouth shut, because I couldn’t deal with any of that awful _singing_ crap.”

“If you can even call it that,” the twin grimaces, “sounds more like a toad dying to me.” The twin launches into a croaked-out rendition of the refrain of “Do You Want to Build a Snowman” as the two of them shove each other and toss their gym clothes into their bags, and Carlos feels his sweaty gym shirt itching against his skin.

It’s a thought he’s had in the back of his mind before, sure, a thought he’s swallowed down and pushed aside like all those other thoughts he tells himself he can’t be having, like those awful times where he thinks he might be having _emotions_. For the most part, he just doesn’t think about why he doesn’t think about princesses much at all - he’s too busy with his chores, too bent on world domination (or at least getting into AP Evil Science next year) to pay much attention to the Auradon News Network as anything other than background noise while he’s working on his inventions.

He doesn’t think about it much at all until a few weeks later, when he finds an _unexpected_ piece of loot to add to his stash underneath his mattress.

There’s a big bundle of packets that he finds on the barge one Saturday, a bunch of rubber-banded papers and pamphlets that look like they must have once been someone’s discarded mail, and Carlos decides on impulse to swipe them in case anything might prove useful for his inventions. Most of it is junk, he discovers, sorting them into piles on his mattress later that night: bills, royal correspondence, a letter from someone’s grandmother that entertains him for a minute with its loopy handwriting and overly-goopy prose. There is, however, a small folded pamphlet that catches his eye, titled _Villains: The Sordid Truth_ , with an oddly-drawn portrait of the Evil Queen smirking into a mirror at a vision of Snow White sleeping soundly on her royal bed. Carlos puts that one in a pile by itself to look at later, thinking that maybe reading the silly and inaccurate things the Auradonian press writes about villains might make his mother crack a rare smile of amusement.

As it turns out, he _definitely does not_ end up giving the pamphlet to his mother.

It’s not that he’s - he’s not - there are _things_ he’s _heard_ living on the island, for sure, whispers and things that he’d always assumed were off-the-wall rumors made up by bored minions and never really given much thought to. He knows that there are evil enchantresses who occasionally share their shacks to pool their resources and plot revenge better with two heads than one, or old curmudgeonly viziers whose hatred for the princesses who ruined their lives runs so deep they’ve sworn off anyone that even remotely reminds of them, but he’s never, not really -

Except the things that this pamphlet claims are, well. He’s fairly certain some of them aren’t true, or at least he doesn’t think so, from what he knows of these villains and their families, but the things in this pamphlet are. Not _accusations_ , because he thinks those, coming from such official Auradon correspondence like this, should make him bristle with pride at the reputations of his fellow islanders, not leave a feeling in the pit of his stomach that feels like eating too many spoiled blueberries mixed with one of those _emotions_ he’s certain he doesn’t possess.

The things in this pamphlet are cautionary tales to the people of Auradon, tales about Ursula and all of the reasons she lures giggling fair maidens of the sea into her lair that have nothing to do with stolen voice spells. Rumors about Scar and his hyenas, with details that make his eyebrows shoot up. Stories about princes lured away in enchanted forests by wicked fae boys, their destined princesses waiting in sleep for centuries now.

Tales of an entirely _different_ kind of hatred of princesses that he’d never properly considered before now.

He lays awake for hours on his lumpy mattress, thinking about those tales and wondering. Thinking about Gaston’s twins and how much he hates their locker room talk. About how he always rolls his eyes and switches the channel when Princess Talk comes on while he’s working in his treehouse but doesn’t mind the biographies about Prince Eugene nearly as much, which maybe has less to do with how Prince Eugene used to be a thief than he originally thought it did. About Anthony Tremaine’s still-dazzling regal smile and his hand lingering on Carlos’ shoulder that day in the seventh grade when he’d seen his mother’s chore note.

He thinks and he wonders and he hears a tiny voice in the back of his head that says, maybe _this_ is finally something he’s done right as a villain. He might still be working on the world domination aspect of his Mad Scientist identity, working up to lasers and weather machines instead of household gadgets to help out with his chores, but maybe this is an aspect of villainry where he’s finally ahead of his classmates instead of scrambling to catch up as the runt of the litter.

Because there are villains whose hatred of princesses runs so deep that they - not _date_ , because no one on the island _dates_ who isn’t holding onto their last vestiges of regal courtesies, but there are villains who, according to this pamphlet, have _arrangements_ with other villains, because even the idea of soft curls and skirts is too close to coronations and crowns for comfort. _Counterculture_ , the pamphlet calls it scathingly, along with other words he’s never heard before, words used in ways that threaten to make those pesky definitely-not-emotions bubble up all over again.

Maybe this is a way he can become a proper villain one day, he thinks. An _arrangement_ sounds far less lonely than the drafts blowing through his closet right now, at least.

*

Carlos is a few months away from his sixteenth birthday when he finally meets someone to call his first best friend, and it’s the Evil Queen’s daughter, who is in his Vanities and Evil Schemes classes and is the first princess he’s ever thought _pretty_ was an appropriate descriptor for.

His mother always yells at him when he uses the word _friend_ , which he’s starting to think more and more these days is for reasons that have nothing to do with how the term implies weakness of the heart. He’s smart enough to know that _friend_ doesn’t mean what it means on Auradon, though: on the island, friendship is measured in increments of usefulness, in bartering power and scheming prowess to complement your own and a way to pass the time in the boredom of exile. Friendship, too, is an arrangement, so when Evie transfers into their school in sophomore year and quickly reveals herself to be the smartest person other than himself he’s ever met, he thinks, _this alliance could be valuable one day_.

Which is why he’s uncertain about this proclamation of a party at his house when Jay waltzes into his house that Friday afternoon with four bags of rotten groceries and informs him of exactly what Mal’s evil plans are for Evie at the bash.

Jay is in his Advanced Potions class this year, and they’ve been. Not _hanging out_ , exactly, but he and Mal have become something even more like tentative acquaintances as of late - mostly for advice on the bartering value of stolen baubles based on their metallic composition and other assorted intellect-based bidding - and seeing as how Jay is Mal’s best friend on the island, Carlos likes to think that that makes them tentative acquaintances once-removed, in a sense. Sometimes they end up falling in step in the hallways talking about assignments on their way to and from class or sharing an eyeroll over Mal’s shoulder over whatever it is she’s in a snit about this week, which isn’t exactly friendship, but it’s an ace Carlos certainly wants to keep in his pocket. 

(Mostly for how it raises his social status ever-so-slightly to be seen in cohorts with someone with the reputation of Jafar’s son, he’s sure, even in the times he finds himself staring for a moment too long across the locker room while Jay’s changing. He’s been thinking still, thinking ever since that Auradon pamphlet, and he’s. Well. Whatever the status of that part of his villainry is, he figures that if he sometimes finds himself daydreaming over his textbooks about Anthony Tremaine’s still-dazzling regal smile or zoning out on Vanities course content when Prince Hans’ eldest son gives his student-teaching presentations, there’s no harm in doing a little window-shopping with things that pertain to other kinds of _arrangements_.

Which might be something he’s indulging in a little while Jay pulls snack bowls and plates down from his kitchen cabinets, he realizes, when Jay waves a hand in front of his face and blinks at him.)

“Earth to Carlos,” Jay says, leaning against the kitchen island to grin at him, “you okay over there?”

“Yeah, I’m good,” Carlos says, and reaching for the bowl of stale chips Jay hands him, “just getting distracted worrying about my end-of-year scheme, I guess.”

“Dude, did you even hear any of that?” Jay asks.

“Sorry,” Carlos says sheepishly, and Jay shakes his head, reaching over to ruffle Carlos’ hair. (Jay, he has noticed, is a very. _Physical_ sort of friend. Carlos has heard rumors about that, about Jay and how he makes his stealing - salacious whispers from Silly Girls’ daughters at their lockers and occasional rumblings about some of the more formerly-elegant boys in their class, ones that he can never tell if the jocks mean derisively or jealously.) 

“Anyway, as I was saying,” Jay continues, “Mal thinks she’s going to sneak some exploding powder from the science lab into her compact, so when she goes to fix her lipstick it’ll blow up and smear all over her face.” Jay sees about five different reasons that plan won’t work, but he’s still a little afraid to contradict Mal, so he lets it go. “Or else lock her in your mom’s fur closet, I think.”

Carlos tries not to visibly gulp at that.

“I mean, only if that’s okay with you,” Jay says, slowly, and Carlos realizes his face must be as green as his throat feels.

“Of course it’s okay,” Carlos says, grabbing for a chip out of the bowl to have something to do with his hands. “Why wouldn’t it be okay?”

Jay studies him for a moment with an expression Carlos can’t read, and then says, “are you sure? I mean, I get it, my dad would be so mad if I pulled a prank with his merchandise at the shop, so if - ”

“My mom wouldn’t be mad,” Carlos cuts him off, and snaps instead, “I just think Mal could do way better when it comes to evil pranks, that’s all.”

“Whatever you say,” Jay says, grabbing bowls in both hands and heading for the Great Hall, and Carlos blows out a deep breath once he’s out of earshot and tells himself to think about window-shopping things instead while Jay is stringing streamers and laying out snacks on the dining table.

He thinks he does an okay job at hiding his worry for the next several hours, only snapping four or five times at freshmen who ask him which way the punch bowl is - until he hears Evie's screams coming from behind the closet, that is.

He doesn't _care_ about Evie, or anything like that, of course, it's just that. He’d told Mal, the time they were working on their sixth-grade Evil Schemes project and the Infamous Closet Mishap had occurred, that it was the first time he’d ever gotten tangled up in his mother’s fur traps. He’d lied. They hadn’t been acquaintances back then, or even particularly friendly, and so when Mal had seen the scars on his leg the next week at school and shown him her own arm with a scowl, he’d played along. He’d learned years before to stop mentioning to other kids where he slept, and he certainly wasn’t about to offer up about how he’d gotten the first of his closet scars when he was five.

It’s just that he knows all of Evie’s evil pride lies in her beauty, and he’s never one to begrudge someone their best shot at true villainry, especially when it doesn’t conflict with his own plans for world domination.

So Evie finding out a little embarrassing thing like the fact that he sleeps in his mother’s dressing room attached to her fur closet is the first of two secrets he tells that night.

The second one comes later, after rockets that burst through roofs and strange television programs and the thrumming promise of something that might be _magic_ still lingering in the island air. That one comes when they’re hiding away from the party in his treehouse, half-watching the television but mostly talking over it. Evie, he finds out, is an amateur seamstress, which Carlos thinks is a lot like inventing when you think about it: repurposing old bits and scraps into something new, something functional out of what used to be someone else’s trash. He’s always thought there was a sort of beauty, albeit a menacing and terrible one, to the various gadgets and household tools he’s constructed out of whatever he can loot and barter and salvage off of shelves in rooms his mom never goes in anymore, so he thinks he understands how Evie can find that same beauty in ripped pieces and patches of fabric. Evie wrinkles her nose and tells him he’s weird for that, but her laughter says that she knows what he means, too.

He thinks that this is what’s been missing with Harry and Jace, or with older kids who have pretended to like him over the years for his intellect, or even with his tenuous acquaintanceship with Mal. He thinks, laying on the beat-up old couch cushions in the corner of the treehouse floor, he finally understands what it’s like to have a real friend.

Which is why, when Evie tells him later that they don’t have to keep Princes of the Week on for her sake, Carlos takes a risk and lets his first best friend in on secret number two.

“That’s okay,” he says, distracting himself by picking at a couch cushion thread, because he’s not ready to say this kind of thing looking anyone in the eye about it, “I really don’t mind, I. I like to watch about the princes, too. If you know what I mean.”

Evie’s eyes scrunch up in confusion for a second before something clearly appears to dawn on her. “Oh,” she says, and doesn’t say anything again for another long moment, a moment Carlos thinks he’d be willing to throw himself to a pack of wild dogs for in order to end. Then Evie smiles and reaches for his hand, and says, “well, then, I guess that’s just another thing you and I have in common.”

They spend the next half an hour talking and giggling in the treehouse, about up-and-coming princes and about Anthony Tremaine’s still-dazzling regal smile and about how much more attractive Prince Eugene used to be back in the days when he called himself Flynn Rider, and Carlos doesn’t even try to convince himself that the emotions he’s feeling right now aren’t the happiest ones he’s ever felt in his life.

(If he scowls a little and shakes his head when Evie mentions _just how handsome_ she thinks Jay is, it’s only because he reminds himself that friendship should still be a calculation of usefulness, an upper card always ready in his hand, no matter how many of his secrets Evie knows.)

*

There are times when Carlos thinks that maybe the _way_ Jay is physical with him in their tentative acquaintanceship once-removed is. Different, somehow, from the way he’s physical with the other kids on the island. Jay’s reputation at school keeps growing - Carlos knows there are girls who will steal their mothers’ best jewelry from their nightstands, in the hopes that Jay will lean against their locker between classes and run his fingers over their necks for a chance to touch the scratched-up pearls, knows there are boys who steal powders from science class or books off teachers’ desks just for a reason to have something to trade at Jafar’s shop. Rowdy and flirty is Jay’s way, so Carlos assumes that winks tagged onto the end of their conversations sometimes are habit by now, a reflex that comes so naturally that its target is irrelevant. Still, there have been times over the past few months, brief flickers and questions, where Carlos isn’t sure what to make of the looks Jay gives him, or how often Jay’s hands brush against his at their desk tables in Advanced Potions, or the way his arm slings around Carlos’ shoulders when they fall into step in the hallways and doesn’t leave until they’ve made it to their next class. It’s different from the way he is with Mal, and Jay’s been best friends with her since the fifth grade, but Carlos supposes that’s because Mal is _Mal_ , prickly and short-tempered and guarded; he can’t imagine her to be one for casual physicality with anyone, really. Carlos chalks it up to the fact that it’s just that he’s never had a male friend before, even one that’s only a tentative acquaintance.

Until their quest for Maleficent’s scepter, that is, when sometime in between goblin boats and gargoyles, he’s almost pretty sure it has nothing to do with what he might be _wanting_ to read into any of those things.

About halfway through the thorn forest, they hit a patch on the path that’s too covered in vines to continue, so Mal suggests that they retrace their steps to the fork a little way back and split up to look for a better way around. She claims Evie as her partner before anyone has any say, which makes Carlos vaguely terrified that this plan is an excuse to murder Evie right in the middle of their quest. 

Jay laughs and claps a hand on his back at that. “Trust me,” he says once they’re fully out of earshot, “if Mal _really_ wanted to kill Evie, she’d never do it now. That would mean leaving her body here, for no one to ever find. I mean, where’s the acclaim in that?” Carlos smiles at that, and if he leans in a little toward the feeling of Jay’s knuckles kneading into his back before he lets go, it’s only because he needs a little extra reassurance after all the nausea of the goblin boat. “Nah, I think she’s just trying to mess with her a little, you know. Say a few bitchy things, get under that fair skin of hers.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Carlos says, looking over his shoulder at where the girls are walking away from them, Mal’s arm linked too affectionately with Evie’s for comfort still. “So you’ve noticed her fair skin, huh?” he asks, giving Jay’s elbow a shove and bracing himself for the answer.

“Who hasn’t?” Jay says, “I mean. She is the prettiest girl at school, if you’re into pretty and all that.” He stops on the path and looks around, eyeing up the thorns around them. 

“That way,” Carlos points, “it looks like there’s a gap in those thorns we can climb through and make it back on the path up ahead there.”

“Good call,” Jay says, giving him a thumbs-up and bounding forward a few paces.

“Are you?” Carlos asks him when he catches up to him, leaning down to take stock of the gap. “Into pretty and all that, I mean.” He calculates the opening to their size ratios and thinks that, if they slide through on their stomachs or their backs, they can make it through without too many scratches. He’s not sure how thrilled Evie will be with that plan, but it’ll work. 

“Eh,” Jay waves a hand, “whatever. I already think of her like I think of Mal, I suppose.” Jay crouches down to the ground, and Carlos motions for him to give it a try. After a minute of pushing his heels in the dirt and wriggling himself through, he pops back up on the other side. “Which is to say,” peeking through thorns to wink at Carlos, “I don’t think of her at all, because who likes Mal, am I right?”

Carlos wonders if this wink, this time, is in fact a _very_ deliberate one.

“Come on, your turn,” Jay says, leaning back down on the other side of the vines. “If you get yourself stuck, I can help pull you through.”

“Hey!” Carlos protests. “I’m smaller than you, and it was my plan, anyway.”

“Fine, then,” Jay says, hands up and stepping away, “if you don’t want my help, then suit yourself.”

Carlos sighs and lays down on the ground, deciding feet-first is the most practical way to slide through. He does end up enlisting Jay’s help to pull him by the boots a little at one point when he can’t bend his knees at the right angle, but makes it through the other side relatively painlessly, save for the smallest prick on his thumb.

“You okay?” Jay asks.

“No big deal,” Carlos says, sucking on the cut a little to stop the bleeding, “besides, these aren’t poisonous. It’s the ones with the shorter thorns you really have to watch out for.”

Jay frowns and grabs for Carlos’ hand, though, and Carlos is ready to reassure him that he recognizes the vines as harmless beyond the pain from their Devious Botanicals textbooks, but it isn’t Carlos’ thumb that Jay seems concerned about. He runs his fingertips over a few of the scars on Carlos’ forearm, and Carlos feels heat rushing through him at the contact.

“They’re from your mom’s closet, aren’t they?” Jay asks, quietly. Carlos looks over his shoulder, searching for where the girls are in relation to here, to have something to do with his eyes but meet Jay’s.

“They’re just scars,” he says. He thinks about adding that they’re from a street fight, or an evil potion exploding a beaker at him, but he knows Jay won’t believe him. “Come on, let’s yell for the girls to turn around and come our way.”

The look he catches Jay giving him at that is the same one he sees on his face later, after he answers the gargoyles’ questions at the bridge, and he thinks maybe he’s never been as good at keeping secrets as he likes to think he is.

*

It’s a few days after their failed quest the next time Carlos sees Jay, at least without the others, and _everything changes_ in those days, it seems. They hadn’t even brought home the scepter, but they’d failed _together_ , and somehow that feels like something new, even more important than world domination. The thought of Mal smirking and asking if he’s in for new evil missions with her, of stealing tablecloths from restaurant tables and bandannas off of minions’ heads with Jay for Evie to make new dresses out of, is enough to make his mother’s screaming and berating bearable and get him through his chores until it’s time to meet up with his friends - his _friends_ \- again. It even makes the Saturday barge fight better, the thought that he might win Mal’s approval on a barter with something he finds or run into Evie at the Slop Shop on the way back. He’s walking back through town when he sees Jay haggling a merchant about the price of a vase to distract him from the kerchief he’s eyeing in his back pocket, and once he sees the pickpocketing is successful, he waves Jay over, grinning.

Jay high-fives him and eyes the ring of rusty keys sticking out of his bag between bottles of lotion and used mop cloths. “Nice score,” he says, plucking them out and twirling them on his fingers, “Mal will be impressed with a trade like this, I can tell you that.”

“Who says they’re for her?” Carlos grins, snatching them back, and Jay laughs as they fall in step together, like so many times in the hallways at school and nothing at all like any of those, now in the _after_ like this. Carlos hardly notices that they’ve turned the wrong way from the road to Hell Hall until he realizes they’re in the alley behind Ursula’s restaurant, and watches Jay jam his fists into his pockets, like he’s trying to steel himself for something.

“I, uh,” Jay says, “I just wanted to. After the other day, I.” He leans up against the back doorway of the warehouse across from Ursula’s, and Carlos follows to sit on the doorway stoop next to him. “I heard your mom saying that stuff after we got home, and I. Thought, you know, that you should know.” Carlos winces; he’d been on such a high from the fun of their quest that he hadn’t let himself consider what his friends had heard. “I don’t - my dad makes me sleep on a rug, you know. Under the television shelves at the shop.” He sinks down onto the stoop beside Carlos and shrugs, and a million things Carlos hasn’t let himself think in the chaos of the past few weeks come flooding back at him all at once. “I’ve been afraid since I was a kid that they’ll all fall on me and I’ll be flat as a pancake the middle of some night, and I guess I just. Thought you should know that.”

Carlos thinks about fair-skinned princesses and _arrangements_ and Jay’s comments in the woods during their quest, and he swears, when he reaches a hand out to him, that it’s only for a reassuring pat on the shoulder to make sure his friend knows he understands. 

He swears he doesn’t know which one of them leans in first, or how they end up pressed together against the warehouse doorway ten minutes later, watching out of the corners of their eyes in case of alley passerbys, biting their lips to stay quiet until they’re gasping for their breath, and when he gets back to Hell Hall an hour later, he closes the door to his closet and flops back on his mattress and wonders how many more kinds of _afters_ he’s still in store for.

And two weeks after that, well, he’s on a limousine en route to _Auradon_.

*

The rules of courtship on Auradon are - weird, Carlos thinks, watching out his dorm window at a princess giggling flirtatiously as a taller boy takes her textbooks in one arm and extends his other in a bow toward the cobblestone path in front of them. There are formal dances and rules about curfews and chaste kisses on the backs of hands, rules that he thinks would make even the most traditional of old regals back on the island roll their eyes right back into their skulls. He still doesn’t understand the appeal of princesses, even beyond the way that he has more words these days to say exactly why, which is something he gets the uncomfortable feeling he should be even quieter about here on Auradon than he had been back on the island, what with all the _moral standards_ and _tradition_ and _royalty_ happening here. It doesn’t really bother him, because the first school dance isn’t for another month and by then they’ll have stolen Fairy Godmother’s wand and no one will be worrying about things like _courtship_ anymore, that’s for sure. Still, he can’t shake the feeling that sometimes the whispers and shoves from some of the popular boys here aren’t _entirely_ about his villain status, can’t stop thinking back to some of the most cautionary words in that old pamphlet, which makes him think that there are things he should maybe. Just nod and go along with until this whole wand fiasco is over and they can go back to their old rules, here and on the island alike.

It’s not like it’s enough to put a stop to _arrangement_ things, just to move them from risky corners of abandoned warehouses to whispers on soft bedsheets closed away behind the door of their dorm room, or to counter an odd look from a jock on the tourney field with a well-placed shove and an eyeroll when Jay’s arm has been around his shoulder for a little too long. He tells himself it’s all part of the getting better at keeping secrets thing: this is part of his villainry, after all, so it’s no different than playing along with other Auradon rules until the coronation.

Dude hops up on the window ledge beside him and makes a low growling noise as the princess twirls a curl around her finger and bats her eyes at her companion, and even though Carlos doesn’t quite speak dog yet, he’s certain he agrees.

“Pretty gross, huh, buddy,” he says, cautiously reaching out to scratch behind Dude’s ears, and Dude responds by pressing his nose into Carlos’ palm and giving him a friendly lick. He still has to bite back that old fear every time he does that, the fear that every time Dude curls up in bed beside him or climbs on his lap for a belly rub will be the time that he realizes, a few missing fingers later, that this “cheerful puppy” act is all part of Dude’s long-con attack. He’d tried to express all of this to Ben this the other night, which had earned him a fond smile and a solemn promise that if that were the case, Dude must be a better villain than the whole of the island put together on account of how long he’s had everyone at Auradon Prep hoodwinked.

Carlos watches the princess and her boy as they walk away down the garden path and thinks to himself that he doesn’t understand Auradon customs at all, honestly.

The thing is that everyone at the school, or everyone in an official capacity, anyway, has been so - _nice_ \- to them since their arrival. There are servants who change their bedsheets and fluff their pillows every morning, hall monitors who stop them to check if there’s anything they can help them find and cafeteria aides who ask if they want an extra scoop of _real fresh fruit_ on their trays today. He thinks he ought to despise it all, their lilting voices and polite _you’re welcome_ s, but he’s never lived anywhere where he didn’t have to worry 24/7 about screaming and panicking to finish his chores, and it’s, well. If he can’t despise it like Mal does, he thinks, he can at least be distrustful of it, can at least remind himself of grumbling jocks and the tiny bit of fear he’s sure is laced behind every question of _is there anything else we can do to make your day brighter_ every time things threaten to get a little too comfortable.

The thing is that Ben, out of everyone, has been the nicest of all, and he’s almost _certain_ there’s something laced behind his niceness that he can’t put his finger on.

Ben is already possibly the nicest, kindest person that Carlos has ever met. He’s charming and intelligent and friends with absolutely everyone at Auradon Prep, with a dazzling princely smile that makes Anthony Tremaine’s look surly and full of cavities by comparison, and no matter how many servants there are to fluff their pillows, Ben always makes sure to take time out of his day to check in with the four of them about how they’re coping with the workload of their classes or if there are any extracurriculars they’re thinking about signing up for yet. He’s knows it’s all part of Ben’s royal duties to make sure that they’re fitting in, since it was his idea to bring them here in the first place, but he’s pretty sure Ben has to be going way above and beyond those duties.

Like, for instance, with the way that Ben seems to remember _everything_ Carlos tells him. He mentions beating a new level in his favorite videogame when Ben catches up with him in the courtyard on a Saturday afternoon, and two days later, he turns on the gaming system in their dorm to find the second and third sequels now stored in his gaming library. He gets distracted in the middle of their conversation in the library by a fantastical clock that tells the time by birdsong and dispenses gumdrops when you wave your hand in front of it, and that night there’s a book waiting outside his dorm room on Auradonian inventions, dog-eared specifically to the section about clock inventors. Ben even seems to remember things Carlos _doesn’t_ tell him, like how one day in the cafeteria he finds a pouch of those peanut butter candies from the limousine waiting for him on the table, with a note attached to it with _something to make your day sweeter!_ written next to the royal seal.

Carlos thinks he must not understand Auradonian customs at all, or else he would think the _future King of Auradon_ was trying to court him.

Dude startles and jolts his head up against Carlos’ hand at the sound of a knock on the dorm room door. “Come on in,” he shouts, petting Dude’s head to calm him down, and Evie leans her head back against the door with a dreamy sigh as soon as it closes.

“Let me guess, you just ran into Chad in the hallway?” Carlos asks.

“He gave me six more of his science worksheets to finish before Monday,” Evie says, beaming.

“Want me to work on half of them?” Carlos offers, because he knows she’d probably rather spend her Saturday night sewing than asking her magic mirror questions about scientific formulas. Evie beams again at that, and Carlos makes an exaggerated eyeroll, but scans the equations excitedly nonetheless when Evie pulls them out of her bag for him.

“Just imagine me, the future _Mrs. Evie Charming_ ,” Evie says, framing the words in front of her with her hands as she flops down on the bed next to him.

“Don’t get ahead of yourself there,” Carlos teases her, “I doubt the answer to the atomic weight of beryllium serves as a stand-in for a marriage proposal.”

Evie tuts her tongue at him. “You should see the way he looked at me just now, when he said he _knew_ I could handle it because of how _clever_ I was,” she says. “Princes don’t take flirtation lightly here on Auradon, Carlos.”

“About that,” Carlos says.

“About Chad?” Evie asks.

“Flirtation, actually,” Carlos says, wondering how to frame what he wants to say. “How do you - you’re more of an expert on this than I am, Evie.”

Evie gasps and takes Carlos’ hands in hers excitedly. “Are you coming to me with _boy questions_?” she asks. “Oh, this is wonderful! Maybe we can have our weddings together, and I can design your tuxedos, it’ll be a _dream_ , I tell you - ”

“Whoa, hold up there, Cinderella,” Carlos says, and Evie grimaces at the mention, but it’s enough to slow her down. “It’s just, I guess, well - how do you know when a boy is flirting with you?”

“That’s easy,” Evie says, “it’s in all the little things. How he looks at you while you’re talking to him, the way he always finds excuses to be around you, how he doesn’t flinch when you brush your hand against his while you’re walking together.” She squeezes his hand. “Is there a special boy who’s caught your eye, too?”

“I’m not sure,” Carlos says, thinking about Ben smiling up at him in the tree that day at tourney training, about the way his hand had lingered on Carlos’ shoulder after he’d given him Dude, and maybe, just a little, about the way Jay winks at him when he thinks no one else is looking.

“Well, if there is one, you know you can always tell me, whether he’s a prince or, well,” she says, “anyone else, for that matter.” She gives what Carlos thinks might be a significant look over at Jay’s side of their dorm room, and Carlos is about to interject when she exclaims, “oh, I almost forgot the reason why I came by!” She pulls her bag onto her lap and hugs it to her chest, bouncing her heels on the floor. “I wanted to make you a little something - you and Dude both. To celebrate your new friendship.”

Evie pulls two hoodies out of her bag, a Carlos-sized one and a puppy-sized one to match. 

“Well, try them on already, both of you!” Evie says, and Carlos slips one arm into his, in awe of how soft the fabric feels. “Do you like them?” 

“You’ll have to ask Dude yourself,” he grins, fluffing Dude’s fur, and Evie claps her hands, “but yeah. I think mine’s just right. Thanks, Evie.”

It’s probably the nicest thing anyone has ever done for him, Carlos thinks, snuggling into his hoodie, so much better than extra strawberries on his lunch tray could ever be.

*

Carlos can’t stop worrying the night before the coronation.

He’s never been a solid sleeper to begin with - his mind has the nasty habit of racing even faster whenever he’s deliberately trying to make it stop - and he’s gotten so used to his lumpy mattress in the closet by this point that most nights he finds his dorm room bed to be too fluffy, his sheets too hot to sleep underneath, which doesn’t help, either. He knows it’s extra tonight, though, considering everything, knows it won’t help no matter how many times he counts through the periodic elements in his head, so he rolls over and tugs Dude in closer to his side and sighs.

“Can’t sleep either, huh?” Jay asks quietly, leaning up on an elbow against his pillow. “Mind if I come over?”

Carlos nods and shoos Dude off onto the floor as Jay sits on the edge of his bed, thinking that, okay, yeah, this is one way to fall asleep when nothing else will do the trick. He thinks he probably shouldn’t get into the habit of thinking of sex as a sleep aid, at least not the kind where someone else is involved, and then shakes his head at how much that sounds like Auradon morals already starting to creep in. He reminds himself that after tomorrow, there won’t be anymore Auradon morals to worry about, which only starts his brain jetting down the tracks again.

Jay lays back on Carlos’ pillow and folds his hands behind his head, sighing. “Are you, um,” Carlos starts, “are you thinking about tomorrow?”

“All I can think about, to be honest,” Jay says, rolling over to face him, and Carlos notices how acutely aware he is of how little distance there is between them. “You?”

“Same,” Carlos says, scooting closer. “Do you really think Mal’s plan is going to work?”

“I have no idea,” Jay says, inching closer too, “but what’s the worst that can happen, I guess?” He lets out a forced laugh. “Either way, our parents are going to kill us, probably.”

“Yeah,” Carlos swallows, “guess we’d better make the most of our last hours alive, huh?” He reaches a hand out to brush a strand of hair off of Jay’s face, but Jay stills his hand with his own, and Carlos wonders if there are more rules to their arrangement now that they’re on Auradon beyond just the extra secrecy, if Jay thinks that’s too much like _courtship_. He wonders if they should set some, to make sure this all stays villainous, even still.

“I was thinking,” Jay says, “I mean, I. Wanted to tell you, after the other day,” and Carlos thinks, _oh_.

“Yeah, about what?” Carlos tries to retrace what girls he’s seen Jay flirting with lately, which jocks he was spending the most time with after their big victory, and figures that this means that if they survive tomorrow, he’d probably best be getting back to those world domination plans as his number one source of villainry.

“The way you stood up to your mom, in Fairy Godmother’s class,” Jay says, letting go of Carlos’ hand. “That was. Really brave, you know?”

“Eh,” Carlos shrugs. “It wasn’t anything, yelling’s kind of the main method of communication at my house.”

Jay shakes his head. “But her at you, and not the other way around, right?”

“I mean. Most of the time, yeah.”

“I think,” Jay says, “I’ve been thinking about it, what Lonnie said and all, and I think that we’ve all gotten it pretty bad, villains for parents and all that.”

“Probably,” Carlos says, and he’s been thinking about that, too.

“But I think,” Jay says, eyes fixed on him, and Carlos thinks he likes this about Jay, the way his words come out slowly sometimes, like he’s thinking through to find just the right ones, unlike Carlos’ own which have always come out so fast. “I think maybe you’ve gotten the shortest straw of all. And I think maybe that makes what you did the other day even braver.”

Carlos tugs the sleeves of his hoodie over his hands and shrugs. “I’ve never really thought of myself as brave, I suppose.”

“I guess we’re learning all kinds of things about ourselves here,” Jay says.

“Yeah,” Carlos says, “too bad we won’t need them after tomorrow, right?” 

“Right,” Jay laughs, and scoots in even closer on the bed.

“You can - I mean, if you want to,” Carlos says, and takes a deep breath before continuing, because it feels important somehow, “if you want to sleep over here tonight, with tomorrow and all. Or not sleep, I guess, whatever.”

“I think,” Jay says, “yeah. I think I’d like that.”

Carlos isn’t sure when exactly he finally drifts off, but when he rolls awake for a moment and feels Jay’s shoulder against his side, he gets this flicker of hope that maybe, there’s an infinitesimal chance their plan might not be a disaster somehow.

*

The next day, Mal chooses good.

Mal chooses good, and Maleficent’s blackened heart shrinks her to the size of a salamander, and suddenly everything feels like an _after_ Carlos never knew to want. He isn’t sure what the rest of their parents are planning - he’s terrified about it when he lets himself dwell on it, to be honest - but after everything at the coronation, he thinks whatever’s ahead is something the four of them can face together.

No - not just the four of them, even. 

They have other friends now, Doug who follows Evie around and looks at her like she’s a princess after all, and Lonnie and Jane and so many other kids who don’t seem to be so afraid of them anymore, or if they are, it’s been made clear to them it’s no longer the acceptable Auradonian custom to let it show. And they have Ben, who is still gracious and charming and still in love with Mal even after the potion wears off, and Carlos thinks that with that many people on their side - on the side of _good_ now - they can probably fight off whatever’s coming their way.

They have Ben, whose voice he hears calling into the dorm room for him as he knocks a few afternoons later while Carlos is finishing up his homework.

“It’s open,” Carlos shouts, and Ben steps inside. (It still feels good to leave their dorm room door unlocked, to know he can come and go as he pleases, if he wants a late-night snack from the cafeteria or ends up at the library until Fairy Godmother is shooing him out for curfew. He hasn’t even been locking their door since their second week at Auradon Prep, and it feels good, if still new.)

“What are you working on there?” Ben asks, walking over to sit down beside him.

“Just a history report,” Carlos says, pushing his laptop to the side, “what’s up?”

“I just wanted to stop by so I could give you this,” Ben says, handing him two envelopes with a royal seal, one addressed to him and the other to Jay, “and formally invite you to the party tomorrow night, in your honor for defeating Maleficent.”

“Another one?” Carlos teases, sighing.

“This one will be with less fireworks,” Ben laughs, “I promise.” Dude jumps up on the bed and licks eagerly at Ben’s hand, nuzzling into him. “How are you two getting along, by the way?”

“Great,” Carlos says, swatting at Dude’s nose and motioning for him to come over to him instead, “come on, buddy, don’t bother at him like that.”

“I can see that,” Ben says, smiling at them again with that fond look that Carlos can never read right. Dude leaps over him and lands squarely on Carlos’ lap. “You don’t even wince anymore when he does that.”

“I guess my mom was wrong about dogs after all,” Carlos says, scratching Dude’s ears. “Unless you think he’s still plotting away in that furry little brain.” He pauses. “You don’t, do you?”

“Not even for a minute,” Ben says, reaching a hand out to pet Dude too, brushing his fingers against Carlos’ as he does and stiffening a little. “Your mom was wrong about a lot of things, you know.”

“Yeah,” Carlos says, “I guess maybe she got a few things pretty backwards, huh?”

“Not just a few things,” Ben says softly, looking at Carlos with a serious expression on his face. “Your parents did a lot of things that weren’t good things, you know that, right?”

“Well, they _are_ villains,” Carlos says, shrugging.

Ben shakes his head at that. “You know, before I made my proclamation, I did a lot of research about the island,” he says, “about which of you would be the best fit here at Auradon Prep. I asked around with advisors, I read up on all your parents, I even went to Fairy Godmother for her help in enchanting a mirror looking out to the island so I could see all of you firsthand a little.” Carlos’ stomach knots at that, wondering just what all Ben might have seen. “I didn’t just choose you four because of the goodness I could see in your hearts, or because of what was in Yen Sid’s student reports about you.”

“Then why did you choose us?” Carlos asks, looking up at him.

“I chose you because I thought you needed the most help, too,” Ben says, “I thought the four of you needed off that island as fast as I could get you here.”

Carlos thinks about life on the island, a life that seems a lifetime away these days, about scraping the ends out of bottles of expired cleaner and going to bed hungry and the pitying - no, not pitying, he thinks, and the word he finds instead in how Ben is watching him is _sympathetic_ \- looks that even the other villain kids used to give him, and he thinks maybe Ben is even smarter than he gives him credit for. Which is a lot to say, coming from a maybe-not-so-evil genius like him.

“Well, thanks,” Carlos says, nodding his head at the dorm room around him, “for everything, I guess.”

“You’re really special, you know that, Carlos?” Ben says, and the look he’s giving him now is not sympathy, not quite. “I mean, you all are, I mean. Mal’s awfully special,” he blushes, looking down at his hands, and Carlos elbows him teasingly at that. “But you’re really special too, don’t ever let yourself forget that, okay?”

“I’ll try not to,” Carlos says, and thinks that he can work on meaning it, at least.

“Try really hard,” Ben says, looking up at the doorway as Jay walks through, wiping sweat off his face with the collar of his tourney jersey. “And remember that I’m not the only one who thinks it.”

He leaves his comments hanging in the air between them as he high-fives Jay on the way out of their dorm room, and Carlos wonders just how powerful enchanted mirrors can be.

*

Carlos takes Dude out for a walk on the grounds later that night, and as soon as he’s back inside the dorm room door, Jay pushes him up against a wall and kisses him.

Kisses him and kisses him again, and that’s not the arrangement at all - they don’t do that very often, haven’t since that first time in the alley behind Ursula’s restaurant, really - and all Carlos can think is that he doesn’t want it to stop.

Jay pushes him up against a wall and kisses him until Carlos is fisting his hand in the fabric of Jay’s shirt, and Carlos wonders how much of Auradon has already gotten under his skin, because he can’t for the life of him remember what the rules of arrangements are.

Carlos pulls back and rests his forehead on Jay’s, and Jay gives him a small, scared look like he’s asking, _this is okay, right?_ Carlos nods in response before leaning up and kissing him again.

It hits him then that it’s not Auradon getting under his skin, not really. He still doesn’t understand things like _courtship_ , but the more he kisses Jay back, the more he thinks he knows exactly what this is.

_Repurposing,_ like he’d told Evie so long ago.

This is repurposing - taking old bits and scraps of his life on the island and turning them into something he can work with here on Auradon, in this _after_. Maybe he doesn’t need to rely on a villainous arrangement anymore to kiss Jay like this, to reach down and grab for Jay’s hand, and maybe it’s okay if it takes them a while to figure out what that means in terms of Auradon and courtship rules.

He thinks they can figure it out together, because repurposing is one of the things he does best.

He is a mad scientist, after all.


End file.
